What about the Road?
A Good Samaritan Sermon for America
I had the pleasure of speaking at Unity Spiritual Center of Portland this past weekend, a wonderful progressive community with a 100 year history and a place where my family found belonging in our return to the Pacific Northwest.
My sermon was titled “Begin Again: Belonging, Responsibility and Finding the Courage to Life Our Faith.” you can find the full service linked here.
At one point I referenced the Good Samaritan story - a story so familiar that it risks becoming sentimental or cliché. A moral vignette. A call to be nicer. A reminder to help people in need even if its uncomfortable.
Yet despite its familiarity in our cultural milieu - there is far more depth here than we often explore, so let’s get into it….
The scene opens on a road, a very well-known road.
A man is traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho - on a steep, winding descent notorious in the ancient world for danger, isolation, and ambush. And on that road, violence happens. A man is beaten, stripped, and left for dead.
What follows is a pattern all too familiar, especially for those ears who first received this story. They knew this road, and what comes next.
First comes the priest; representative of religious authority, moral certainty, doctrinal purity. He sees the wounded man and passes by on the other side. Not because he is cruel, but because he is constrained. Bound by rules about cleanliness, risk, and order. Compassion would complicate his theology.
Then comes the Levite: also a religious man, perhaps considering himself less dogmatic than the priest (you know, some religious people think they are different and or better than other religious people), yet still unwilling to help. He embodies something all too familiar in our society: rationalization. He moves with the quiet logic that says, If they would just follow the rules… if they wouldn’t put themselves in danger… if they stayed in their place…What is he doing here anyway?
We hear those same voices today.
If they hadn’t brought a gun.
If they had stayed out of the way.
If they had complied.
If they had made better choices.
The road is dangerous, yes, but somehow the blame always lands on the body lying in it.
And then Jesus introduces the Samaritan. The one religion taught you to distrust. The outsider. The wrong kind of believer.
The Samaritan does the unthinkable. He crosses the road.
He moves toward danger rather than away from it. He puts himself at risk. He touches what is wounded. He binds the injuries. He spends his own money to ensure the recovery of his neighbor. He stays and by doing so exposes himself to the same dangers that injured the man on the road.
The Samaritan has a name;
Alex Pretti.
Alex crosses the road—not just once, but again and again. Not only in a singular moment of courage, but as a way of life. As an ICU nurse at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Alex tends the wounded daily—veterans whose bodies and nervous systems carry the long aftermath of wars most of us experience only as headlines or abstractions.
Alex dared to defend and protect his neighbor with his body. Not performative compassion. Not moral posturing. But proximity.
Presence that costs something. Just like it cost Renee Good a mere 2 weeks prior.
And yet, if we stop the story there, we let ourselves off too easily. Because the parable doesn’t just ask: Who was the neighbor? It also leaves us with a harder, unanswered question:
A refrain I first heard from my teacher, Bishop Yvette A. Flunder: What about the Road Beloveds?
Why is this road so dangerous in the first place?
The priest and the Levite aren’t just individuals, they are systems. They represent institutions that know how to move past suffering without interrupting themselves. Religious systems. Political systems. Cultural systems. Economic systems.
And the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, is not just a path between two cities. Metaphysically, it’s the movement from spiritual idealism (Jerusalem) into lived reality (Jericho, the first city discovered in the Promise Land). This is a journey from safety into risk. From abstraction into flesh-and-blood complexity.
It is the journey that Ernest Holmes described as the process when “Thoughts become Things”
You see, its one things to hold thoughts of love, compassion, belonging, inclusion and oneness. It’s quite another thing to embody those thoughts in real and tangible ways that inform structure, policy, systems and regulations that govern a society.
The road is the social terrain we have collectively built over decades whether consciously or unconsciously. Its the place where the conditions, inequities and fault lines of injustice are exposed and imposed upon the most vulnerable among us.
A road shaped by fear, by inequality, racialized violence, by poverty and economic exploitation. A road shaped by policies that abandon some bodies while protecting others.
We praise the Samaritan—and we should. Alex Pretti, and Renee Good, are among the many who are willing to put their bodies between cruelty and their neighbor. They model the kind of moral conviction and sacrifice that is not new - but is a cost that has been required throughout the history of our nation.
What’s different this time is that the bodies paying that price are white.
Black and brown communities in America have always understood that state will manufacture any story necessary to justify your death if you stand in the way of their supremacy and control.
“when it is a Black body on the ground, the public is trained to accept that narrative as the default. There’s no mass epiphany about authoritarianism, no widespread talk of propaganda, no collective sense that something fundamentally un-American has occurred.” - Dr. Stacey Patton
But that insight is fairly new to white folks.
We are right to be outraged by their death, by the callous indifference in which it occurred and the quickness with which the authorities sought to cover it up.
And we are right to honor the moral courage and heroic acts of Renee and Alex. But admiration is not the same as responsibility.
admiration is not the same as responsibility.
How long will we rely on heroic individuals to do what we refuse to do together?
How many more must cross the road, put themselves in harm’s way, and bind wounds that come from the systems of racism, dominance and control, before we ask what it would mean to tend the road itself?
Jesus doesn’t answer that question in the parable. He leaves it with us, because the answer does not come from a single individual, but from the collective action of a community.
Addressing The Road
We must ask why are so many people forced onto perilous roads in the first place? Why do families risk deserts, rivers, and detention centers rather than remain where they are? What are the global factors that contribute to Americas immigration crisis?
The answers are not accidental realities.
They are constructed ones.
They are the result of foreign policy decisions, economic exploitation, climate destabilization, political violence, and decades of intervention that has enriched some nations while destabilizing others. They are the legacy of trade agreements that hollow out local economies, of wars that fracture societies, of corporations that extract wealth while exporting suffering.
And then when the wounded arrive, we ask them why they didn’t choose a safer road.
Why didn’t they come the “right” way?
Why didn’t they wait their turn?
Why didn’t they stay where they belonged?
As if the road they fled was not already soaked in danger. As if legality were available to those escaping desperation. As if borders were more sacred than human life. And most importantly as if the policies that ensure our own comfort and privilege did not contribute to their condition.
At some point, tending the wounded without transforming the conditions that wound them becomes a form of spiritual bypass. A way of feeling righteous while preserving the very structures that make righteousness necessary.
The deeper call of this moment is not simply Who will cross the road today?
Instead, we must be willing to ask:
What policies keep making this road lethal?
What narratives have trained us to fear the wounded instead of the conditions that produced their wounds?
What would justice look like if we treated migration not as a crime, but as a human response to unbearable conditions?
And what responsibility do we bear—not individually, but collectively—for the world we have helped shape?
What Makes Us Think We Are Exempt?
Once we have the courage to peel back the curtain and explore these questions - White America will come face to face with the most pressing question:
What makes us think we are exempt?
Exempt from history, from memory? Exempt from the very forces that shaped us?
As if our ancestors did not cross seas under conditions of desperation and coercion. As if they did not arrive hungry, frightened, undocumented, unwanted.
As if they were greeted with open arms rather than suspicion, violence, and laws designed to keep them “in their place.”
As if the story of America is not, at its core, a story of migration as well as conquest and control of black and brown bodies.
We speak of “illegal” crossings as though desperation waits politely for permission. As though paperwork precedes survival. As though the lines we now defend so fiercely have always existed—and always existed for us.
But many of those now shouting loudest about borders descend from people who crossed oceans fleeing famine, poverty, religious persecution, political instability, or economic collapse. They came because staying meant death, or something close to it.
And then, having arrived, we did something even harder to face.
We declared ourselves natives.
“when the state calls somebody “illegal,” it is saying: you violated borders that were created through violence, laws that were written by the victors, and a sovereignty that was established by erasing the people who originally had it.” - Dr. Stacey Patton, Deport White People?
We became strangers in a foreign land who quickly forgot we were guests. We claimed ownership. We drew borders. We exploited the land. We displaced and dominated its original peoples. And we wrapped the whole project in moral and religious language to protect our self-righteousness.
Manifest destiny. Divine favor. Civilization. Order.
And now, generations later, we speak as if belonging is inherited virtue. As if citizenship is moral superiority. As if safety is something we earned rather than something we seized and secured - at the expense of others.
The priest and the Levite had reasons.
So do we.
They had laws.
So do we.
They had stories that justified passing by.
So do we.
And its exactly why we are here today.
What Dr. Stacey Patton names so powerfully in her piece, Deport White People? , is not simply hypocrisy—it is selective amnesia. A willful forgetting that allows us to imagine ourselves as the rightful owners of a land shaped by displacement, extraction, and exclusion. Making rules about the arrival of others that some how don’t apply to our own history.
But scripture is relentless in its reminder: you were once strangers in a strange land.
And whenever a people forget that truth, compassion narrows, fear hardens, and cruelty begins to sound like norms we cannot control.
So perhaps the real question is not whether immigrants deserve mercy.
It is whether we are finally willing to tell the truth about ourselves. Perhaps this is all coming to the surface so that White America can come face to face with its own history.
To remember that we are not exempt. That we never were. That borders have always been porous when power demanded it. And that the road we are defending so fiercely was built, in part, by our own forgetting.
Until we face that truth, we will keep mistaking self-protection for righteousness—and call it patriotism.
But there is an awakening underway, and to stay awake we must be more than outraged. We must remember.
Remembrance, when it is honest, has a way of undoing the lies that keep us passing by on the other side of the road.
Go and do Likewise
Jesus ends the parable with a command: Go and do likewise.
But perhaps our generation must hear an additional charge:
Go—and rebuild the road.
If we are serious about rebuilding the road with justice, we must begin with a moral vision of a world that actually works for all.
A moral vision is not spiritually abstract. It is concrete, demanding, and accountable. It answers the question “What should be?” with enough specificity that it can be measured, challenged, and lived.
But far too often, spirituality speaks of unity without structure, love without policy, compassion without cost. But justice does not emerge from good intentions alone. It requires design. It requires choices. It requires a willingness to say this is what dignity looks like in practice.
A moral vision of a world that works for all insists on tangibility:
It asks whether people have safe passage, not just warm words.
It asks whether families have legal pathways, not just prayers.
It asks whether labor is protected, housing is accessible, healthcare is available, and asylum is humane.
It asks whether our laws reduce harm, or merely manage it out of sight.
This kind of vision refuses to confuse charity with justice.
Charity binds wounds after the fact. Justice asks why the wounds keep happening.
Charity depends on the goodwill of individuals. Justice demands the transformation of systems.
And justice is not vague. It is specific enough to be uncomfortable.
It names policies that punish survival.
It challenges narratives that criminalize desperation. It confronts economic arrangements that require displacement to function. It insists that borders are political tools, not moral absolutes.
To rebuild the road with justice is to commit ourselves to more than kindness—it is to commit ourselves to structural care.
Care that is written into law. Care that is reflected in budgets. Care that shows up in who is protected, who is believed, and who is allowed to belong.
Our call in this moment is to get clear on the vision of the world we want to create. Because a faith that cannot describe the world it is working toward will always default to maintaining the world as it is.
faith that cannot describe the world it is working toward will always default to maintaining the world as it is.
A moral vision gives us more than inspiration. It gives us direction.
And direction is what allows compassion to scale beyond heroic individuals and become a shared way of life.
The Samaritan crosses the road. But justice asks us to remake it.
That is the work before us. Not abstract love. Not spiritual language without teeth.
But the hard, sacred labor of imagining, and building, a world where crossing the road is no longer an act of courage, only of humanity.
A Prayer for Those Who Refuse to Pass By
Let us take a breath—
not to escape the weight of this moment,
but to let it settle where it belongs.
Spirit of Life,
You who move through history and flesh alike,
we come without exemption and without defense.
We confess how easily we pass by—
how quickly we explain danger rather than dismantle it,
how readily we spiritualize suffering we did not choose,
how often we mistake order for justice
and silence for peace.
Awaken us!
Awaken us from forgetfulness—
that we are not natives to innocence,
that our safety has a history,
that the road beneath our feet carries more than our footprints.
Strengthen in us the courage to cross the road
when love demands proximity,
and the resolve to rebuild it
when justice demands change.
Let our compassion grow teeth.
Let our prayers grow legs.
Let our faith grow specific enough
to be written into policy,
felt in bodies,
and measured in lives made safer.
Where we have relied on heroes,
teach us to become a people.
Where we have praised mercy,
teach us to practice justice.
Where we have tended wounds,
teach us to transform the conditions that cause them.
May we remember—
that borders are human-made,
that dignity is not earned,
that no one is illegal in Your creation.
And may we be counted among those
who refuse to pass by on the other side—
not only today,
but until the road itself no longer requires courage to cross.
Amen.
Spiritual Practice:
From Crossing to Rebuilding
For personal reflection or group use
Recall the Road
Bring to mind a “road” in your own life or society—
a place where harm is predictable,
where suffering repeats,
where compassion is required again and again.
Name the Wound
Ask quietly: Who is being harmed here—and how?
Let the answer be specific, not theoretical.
Name the Condition
Now ask: What makes this harm likely?
What policies, narratives, fears, or systems keep the road dangerous?
Commit to One Repair
Choose one concrete action—learning, advocacy, giving, speaking, organizing—
that participates not only in care,
but in repair.
Close by placing a hand on your heart and affirming:
I am not exempt.
I am not powerless.
I am part of what must be healed.
Take a breath—and carry that commitment with you.
RESOURCES:
Creating a World that Works for All - by Sharif Abdullah
Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery
Centers for Spiritual Living Global Vision of a World that Works for Everyone
Rev. Dr. David Alexander D.D., is a public theologian and spiritual writer exploring the intersection of spirituality, justice, and moral imagination in public life. He is the author of Freedom from Discord: The Promise of New Thought Liberation Theology and the visionary behind Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness. David also writes the monthly column Philosophy in Action for Science of Mind magazine.
This is my full time work and primary source of income. Thank you for sharing your good with me. Together, we can demonstrate that abundance is the nature of reality.
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This is an amazing piece. Thank you for it. I will share it widely.
Thank you, David. I have used the metaphysical interpretation of that story many times, but I have never before thought "What about the Road?" I appreciate you and your commitment to giving life to our principles. How about coming to Unity Church of the Hills sometime? Blessings!